Recent Literature

IT is even more unwelcome than ungracious for an American to speak blame of John Stuart Mill. During the long rule of the slaveholders, his censure of our faults was always tempered with sympathy. In our national extremity, he led the forlorn hope of our British friends. Our land was the New Atlantis of his political dreams ; and he trusted us to realize his theory of representative government. There is substantial truth under the extravagant phrase of one of his admirers, that he “ is not only the great philosopher, but the great prophet of our time.”It is then with no ordinary interest that we read his own record of his life, and with no ordinary regret that we find it confirms in two particulars the severest criticisms which were ever made upon his character — the first, in respect to his exercise of the imagination and the feelings ; the second, in respect to his estimate of Christ and Christianity.

For self-analysis, the book has no parallel in literature since the Confessions of Rousseau. But the conscious vivisection of the Englishman is as much more painful than the morbid revelations of the Swiss, as Rousseau was a less finely organized creature than Mill, both in nature and in culture. There is hardly a chapter of the Englishman’s book in which we do not detect sensitive tissue and quivering nerves, where in the Swiss there was a thick padding of ingratitude and sensuality. But in the first particular mentioned (making all allowance due to their different times and very dissimilar conditions), they each felt a life-long yearning for a genuine and sympathetic friendship. To the Swiss, it never came. To the Englishman it came late, and under circumstances so imperfectly related as will leave many to doubt whether it would not have been nobler to abstain from it.

The birth of Rousseau cost his mother her life; and for anything that appears in Mill’s autobiography (except casual allusions to his younger brothers and sisters) we might suppose that his mother died when he was born. He does not once mention her, nor ever imply her existence, except by stating the date of his birth. She was a cipher in his life ; and when we consider what that means, we find a partial explanation of some of his deficiencies. There Was no domestic influence to contest or share the sway of his father; and no father ever exercised more absolute sway over a child.

James Mill’s character was intense in every feature; although his son records that “ the ‘ intense ’ was with him a by-word of scornful disapprobation.” He was severe, autocratic, and morbidly logical. “ He thought human life a poor thing at best, after the freshness of youth and of unsatisfied curiosity had gone by.” He executed the task of educating his children, as a task, with a stern persuasion that duty commanded him to impress on them his own convictions as absolute. He was ashamed of the signs of feeling, and despised passionate emotions of all sorts and everything which has been written in exaltation of them. Bred a clergyman, his morbid logic had converted him to infidelity, through the study of Bishop Butler’s Analogy of Religion. “ If we consider further,” his son touchingly says, “ that he was in the trying position of sole teacher, and add to this that his temper was constitutionally irritable, it is impossible not to feel true pity for a father who did, and strove to do, so much for his children, who would have so valued their affection, yet who must have been constantly feeling that fear of him was drying it up at its source.”

Under this discipline, the son’s character was trained as if the intellect was to be its sole component. The child was taught Greek at three years old ; and before eight, had read in the original Plato’s Dialogues and Xenophon ’s Memorabilia of Socrates. His English text-books before tne last-named age included a translation of Mosheim’s Ecclesiastical History, and McCrie’s Life of John Knox. Before twelve, he was drilled in Aristotle’s Rhetoric ; and at twelve, he was introduced to the Novum Organum of Bacon, and put through a course of the logic of the Schoolmen, — as to which last, in view of the fact that, though many philosophers have thought as profoundly, there never was one who thought more clearly than he did, it is worth noting that there was nothing in his education to which he esteemed himself more indebted for whatever capacity of thinking he attained. His imagination got no opportunity to develop, except by chance; and the operation of chance was confined to narrow limits. He had no holidays. The plan of his training involved his careful seclusion from youthful companions. His father put Shakespeare into his hands “ chiefly for the sake of the historical plays.”

From these influences the boy escaped during only one year, out of the whole period of his education ; but happily for himself, and for all of us whom his philosophy influences, he passed that year in genial intercourse with Continental society, as a guest in the families of Sir Samuel Bentham, in Southern France, and Jean Baptiste Say, in Paris. We may safely conjecture that he owed in great part to this episode the sweet and courtly manners which distinguished him.

It is not a matter of surprise that the inheritor of an intense and ardent temperament should have vainly yearned for a satisfying friendship, when the yoke of this repression was relaxed and he was free to select his own companions. That he did so is manifest from numerous passages. He names at least half a score of young associates,— all of them men, most of whom were already famous or afterwards became so, — as sustaining at different times relations of no ordinary intimacy with him. But he seems never to have experienced the friendship of a woman, until, when he was twenty-five and she twenty-three years old, he encountered the lady whom he married twenty-one years later. This was in 1830, six years before his father’s death. She was then the wife “ of a most upright, brave, and honorable man, of liberal opinions and good education, but without the intellectual and artistic tastes which would have made him a companion for her;” for whom, after his death in 1849, Mr. Mill declares that he himself “ had the sincerest respect, and she the strongest affection,” — a declaration which we acknowledge our incapacity to comprehend.

In this lady he “ soon perceived in combination the qualities which in all other persons ” whom he had ever known he “ had been only too happy to find singly.” The fervor of his devotion to her, and to her memory, as many years ago manifested to his readers by the dedications of his Principles of Political Economy and of the essay On Liberty, and now more fully disclosed in these confessions, instantly suggests Auguste Comte’s worship of Madame Clotilde de Vaux, and lends a curious and painful interest to Mill’s criticisms of the influence of that memorable but briefer attachment on Comte’s so-called second career. It also brings to mind, but by way of contrast, the devotion of Mill’s brilliant contemporary, — like him, educated at home, and almost equally influenced by the St. Simonian philosophy, — Henry Thomas Buckle, to his mother. The parallel with Buckle runs even to the dedication of his books. The first volume of the History of Civilization is dedicated “ To my Mother,” and the second to her memory.

It is hardly possible to believe that, if Mr. Mill had not been so exclusively and completely subordinated to his father during childhood and youth, his relation with Mrs. Taylor would have determined his life as it did. Through association with her he first came to allow feeling, as distinguished from reason, its due place ; and in what he styles the third period of his mental progress, which began after this friendship had reached the degree of confidential intimacy, the change of his character ensued which he but partially indicates when he says that he became less a democrat and more a socialist. It was a revelation of a new side of human experience to him, to discover that she reached “ by the moral intuitions of strong feeling” opinions which he had painfully arrived at “ through study and reasoning.” In brief, he then first acquired a religion, if we can accept his definition that “ a religion may exist without belief in a God,”and that, “ if a person has an ideal object, his attachment and sense of duty towards which are able to control and discipline all his other sentiments and propensities, and prescribe to him a rule of life, that person has a religion.” What the religion was may be gathered from his assertion, in the same dissertation,² that “ all other religions are made better in proportion as in their practical result they are brought to coincide with that which Comte aimed at constructing,” the essence of which was “ the idea of the general interest of the human race, both as a source of emotion and as a motive of conduct.” After his wife’s death, he declares : “ Her memory is to me a religion, and her approbation the standard by which, summing up as it does all worthiness, I endeavor to regulate my life.”

So far as we have a right to speculate on what would have been Mr. Mill’s conception of God, had he ever framed one, the hypothesis would be Aryan rather than Semitic. The existence of evil was a fact which he could not reconcile, any more than could his father, with the rule of a deity absolute in power and perfect in goodness. Both of them could have become Parsees, but neither of them a Jew. It is manifest that, like his father, he rested in the conviction that concerning the origin of things nothing has been revealed or can be known, and that speculation on the subject is fruitless.

To Christ as a moral teacher, and to Christianity as an element of human progress, Mr. Mill has always seemed to us persistently unjust, — a fact the more remarkable as his desire to be just not only to all men, but to all their opinions, was so conspicuous in his later years. In his writings, he has more than once spoken of the “ bland and amiable ” teachings of Christ, finding no nobler adjectives with which to qualify them. The students of the essay On Liberty will remember that he styles Socrates “ the head and prototype of all subsequent teachers of virtue,” including Christ in a lower rank, and declares that “ other ethics than any which can be evolved from exclusively Christian sources must exist side by side with Christian ethics, to produce the moral regeneration of mankind.” He accepted the St. Simonian division of history into organic periods and critical periods, and believed that ours will be succeeded by one that will inaugurate the triumph of a creed more advanced than Christianity, in which the moral and intellectual ascendency once exercised by priests will be possessed by philosophers.

These and similar sentiments in the writings of Mr. Mill always bring to our memory, by way of contrast, the words which Rousseau puts in the mouth of the Savoyard Vicar : “ The holiness of the gospel is an argument that speaks to my heart, and to which I should even be sorry to find a good answer. Look at the books of the philosophers with all their pomp; how funny they are by the side of that! Is there here the tone of an enthusiast or an ambitious sectary ? What gentleness, what purity in his manners, what touching grace in his teachings, what loftiness in his maxims ! Assuredly there was something more than human in such teaching, such a character, such a life, such a death. If the life and death of Socrates were those of a sage, the life and death of Jesus are those of a god.”

We have sought eagerly and in vain throughout this autobiography for some chapter, or phrase, or even single word, to lessen our sense of Mr. Mill’s injustice to Christianity but we find not one. We discover only that Socrates, not Christ, was set to him, in his boyhood, by his father, as the model of ideal excellence ; and that it would have been wholly inconsistent with his father’s ideas of duty to allow him to acquire impressions respecting religion contrary to his own convictions and feelings. Closing the book, and remembering its author’s services to mankind, we stand in reverent awe of that love of humanity, which could so ennoble a life passed without the influence of a mother, faith in a Saviour, and belief in a God, and probably also without a hope of individual immortality.

— Since the scholarly achievements of the “ Learned Blacksmith ” became a household word in American families, a generation has grown up for whom his existence has been almost as a myth. It is well, therefore, that in the brief autobiography with which he prefaces his Ten-Minute Talks on All Sorts of Topics, he should come in his later years before his countrymen to remind them what the work of his manhood has really been.

Elihu Burritt was born in 1810, in New Britain, Conn., and at eighteen he apprenticed himself to a blacksmith in that village. He says that he had a “ natural turn ” for mathematics, and that without allowing himself to put down a single figure, he used to make immense arithmetical calculations in his head, and at night repeat them from memory to his brother, who took the figures off on slates, and verified them. This brother persuaded him to make up a quarter’s schooling at twenty-one that he had lost at sixteen, and this he devoted entirely to mathematics, giving also “a few half-hours and corner moments to Latin and French.” At the end of the term he returned to the anvil, and found that he could “ more conveniently pursue the study of languages than that of mathematics, as he could carry a small Greek grammar in his hat, and con over the verbs while at work.” The following winter he spent in New Haven, and devoted himself to languages, studying entirely alone, and dividing his time among seven of them. Before he was thirty he had taught school, tried being a grocer and failed, edited a paper in English and French, and “made himself acquainted with all the languages of Europe and several of Asia, including Hebrew, Syriac, Chaldaic, Samaritan, and Ethiopic,” beside often supporting himself at his anvil. He was beginning to think of turning his acquisitions to some practical account, when the public found him out, and as the “Learned Blacksmith,” he spent one or two winters in successful lecturing. At this period the antislavery movement enlisted his sympathies. He felt, he says, “that there was an earnest, honest, living speech to be uttered for human rights, as well as dead languages to he studied, mostly for literary recreation.” And about the same time his mind became “ suddenly and deeply interested in a new field of philanthropic thought and effort” — the promotion of international peace. The philologist therefore became a philanthropist, and the rest of the autobiography is a rapid sketch of his indefatigable labors, chiefly in England, in editing, traveling, lecturing, and interviewing, to promote in its widest sense peace and good-will on earth among men. As an important means to this end, he “developed in 1847 the proposition of a universal ocean penny postage : that is, that the single service of transporting a letter across the sea in any direction, or to any distance, should be one penny, or two cents, this charge to be added to the inland rate on either side. Thus the whole charge proposed on a single letter between any town in Great Britain, and any town in the United States, was to be three pence, or six cents,” This is, as we all know, the present arrangement, but how many know that we chiefly owe it to the labors and agitations, for twenty-three years, of Elihu Burritt ?

The Ten-Minute Talks of our author are classified as 1. Incidents and Observations. 2. Glimpses by the Wayside of History. 3. Social and Artistic Science. 4. Industrial and Financial Questions. 5. Political Questions. 6. National and International Questions. The essays of the fourth and sixth of these groups are naturally the most able and valuable of the series, for they deal with questions which Mr. Burritt has had under consideration for a quarter of a century. The articles of the former of these are two : The World’s Workingmen’s Strike against War, and The most highly taxed Luxury in the World, i. e., international suspicion. Were ordinary humanity either Christian or rational, it would not need to be persuaded — it would act spontaneously on the conclusions of these articles, and fleets and standing armies would soon be but memories of a barbarous past. But as has often been said, there is nothing men are so glad to pay dearly for, as for the indulgence of their passions, and the passion for fighting is one of the first, as it has proved among the most indestructible, of human characteristics. Mr. Burritt could not, therefore, have proposed to the enthusiasm of his prime a more stubborn stronghold of pride and prejudice to be reduced, than this faith of the nations in the right and the glory of international wars.

In the last group of these essays, Mr. Burritt calls upon his countrymen to take a calm and impartial view of transatlantic affairs, and to lend especially the weight of their public opinion toward overcoming the chronic fear, on the part of England, of the supposed antagonistic policy of Russia toward herself. The historical and political essays of the volume are interesting and suggestive, and the sketches of the first and third groups display a wide range of sympathy and observation. Some of the descriptions— as that of the English farmer’s kitchen hall, and of the Quaker meeting, — are word-paintings in a few telling strokes that are really admirable. The lesson of the whole book, however, is a higher one than that of any of its parts. It shows to us a man of wondrous gifts, giving up, in a sordid and utilitarian age, the scholarly prestige and comfortable livelihood which a devotion to his own specialty would have been certain to accord to him, and spending his life in comparative poverty and obscurity, to sow seeds whose harvests the coming generations will chiefly reap. Seldom does a career of such complete and loving self-abnegation come before one.

— The title of Mr. Cohen’s work indicates very well the ground he goes over, and gives the reader a very fair idea of what awaits him if he is willing to take up the book. It should be said, however, in order to show the spirit in which the book is written, that it nowhere attempts to confute the generally accepted facts as given in the New Testament, by explaining them as inventions or myths, but that the account as we receive it is accepted as giving the historical truth in the matter, and that an endeavor is made to show from this basis that the Jews were not guilty of the crime generally imputed to them, and that their conduct was not only excusable, but also the only one that was reasonable. The nature of the proof on which the author rests is of two kinds : first, from the facts, which, from his point of view, do not go to prove that Jesus indicated his divinity clearlv enough to convince even religious Jews, who had taken warning from false Messiahs ; and, secondly, from the nature of his teaching, much of which is but a repetition of Hebrew morality, while some is of a sort to be incomprehensible to every one, as, for example, that “ the tree which bringeth not forth good fruit must be hewn down and cast into the fire,” or, “ if any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.” Mr. Cohen’s comments on this text even his most earnest opponents must confess are without virulence; he says, “ Doubtless these words may be in some respects explained and justified, signifying in an exaggerated form that devotion to God should hold predominance over all our terrestrial affections and interests. But this exaggeration of expression must have entirely perverted the meaning and the character of his doctrines in the eyes of his Jewish contemporaries, opposed as they were to all to which they had previously adhered. In this infringement of the sacred principle of family life, the traditions of Moses and the prophets of Israel could doubtless be no longer recognized.”

In general, too much praise cannot be given to the admirable temper in which the book is written ; it is a model of controversy of a kind that is especially rare in religious discussions. The answering of the points it seeks to establish can be left to other hands. Meanwhile the book will be found interesting. by all those who, stirred by the agitation that is going on about matters of belief, are giving their attention to the consideration of materials for an independent judgment. None will be shocked by it, so carefully is it written. Many, too, will read with interest the account of the influence St. Paul had upon the growing belief, and on the causes which produced its success ; there, at least, they will find full justice done to the glories of Christianity.

— Mr. Balch’s book, which was written by an American in French for the greater convenience of those who would be unlikely to read it if it appeared in another tongue, is a very interesting and valuable publication. The exact connection between our own army and that of the French, the account of their mutual relations, is buried in the dusty loneliness of our large histories, where we know we can find it if we turn to look for it; but in this volume of Mr. Balch’s we find a completer narration than any with which we are familiar. A valuable source of information of which the author has freely availed himself is the collection he has made of private journals, many unedited, kept by different French officers during their stay in this country. From one of them, that of the Baron du Bourg, an aid-de-camp of Rochambeau, we extract the following passages : —

“ The town of Boston is built like most English towns; the houses, of brick and wood, are very small; inside they are very neat. The people live after the English fashion; they seem very pleasant and kind. I have been treated very kindly by the few people I was able to visit. A great deal of tea is drunk in the morning.” The reason of this excessive tea-drinking is perhaps to be found in his next statements. “ Their dinner, at which a great deal of meat, and very little bread, is eaten, is generally at two o’clock. At about five tea is drunk again, and wine, madeira, punch; and this goes on till ten o’clock. Then they sit down to a supper which is not so heavy as the dinner. ... In general, the greater part of their time is spent at the table.”

On his way to Newport he notices the resemblance of part of the scenery to that of Normandy, and the same thing strikes him again at Newport. About another visit to Boston he writes, —

“ The 14th I left Boston ; but before starting never to return, I was anxious to see some of the society of the place. Twice a week there is a dancing-school where the young people meet to dance from midday till two o’clock. I went in for a short time. I found a very pretty hall, although the English, before abandoning the city, had broken or carried away about twenty mirrors. I found the young women very pretty, but very awkward. It would be impossible to dance worse than they did, or to dress worse in spite of a certain luxury.”

To be impartial, it is necessary to quote what the Due de Broglie wrote about the ladies of Philadelphia, lest possibly other sections of the country should be puffed up with pride and contempt for the people of Boston. He says, —

“ The ladies of Philadelphia are very showily dressed, but generally without much taste; in their coiffure and in their heads there is less frivolity than is the case with Frenchwomen. Although well made, they lack grace, and courtesy very ill; nor do they dance any better. But they know how to make tea; they bring up their children well ; they pride themselves on unflinching fidelity to their husbands, and many are very bright.”

In the more serious parts of his history, Mr. Balch has done his work well; and the stamp of approval has been put on it by the fact that a translation into German is to appear within a few months. The author, we understand, has an English version partly ready. We sincerely trust that it may not be long before we shall be able to read in English the work of an American on a most important part of his country’s history. We grudge Germany its precedence.

— The Personal Recollections of Mary Somerville form a plain and artless but singularly interesting narrative. We are reminded at every page, but only to be touched with new respect, of the extreme age of the writer, — ninety or thereabouts,—at the time these reminiscences were penned. The disproportionate and pathetic clearness imparted to the quaint scenes of her childhood and early youth in Scotland, — the quiet account of her search for difficult knowledge, — the absolutely dispassionate record of her unparalleled triumphs, — the serenity with which she speaks of her sorrows, — nay even the trifling and obvious inaccuracies of detail which occur in her allusions to some of the events of her mature life (still half a century old), all show that these pages were written by one whose life lay far behind her. Occasional gaps in the history are filled by the eldest daughter of Mrs. Somerville in the same spirit of high-minded modesty and reserve which characterizes the autobiography. “ The old woman,” says Mme. Swetchine playfully but truly, “ has not even a name in the elevated style.” So much the worse, maybe, for the elevated style. It is matter at least of literary thankfulness that a style which is merely refined and direct seems quite adequate to describe the career of a perfectly exceptional feminine genius.

Miss Martha Somerville says of her mother in her Introduction to the Memoir (pp. 5, 6), “It would be almost incredible were I to describe how much my mother contrived to do in the course of a day. When my sister and I were small children, although busily engaged in writing for the press, she used to teach us for three hours every morning, besides managing her house carefully, reading the newspapers (for she was always a keen and, I must add, a liberal politician), and the most important new books on all subjects, grave and gay. In addition to all this she freely visited and received her friends. She was, indeed, very fond of society, and did not look for transcendent talent in those with whom she associated, although no one appreciated it more when she found it. Gay and cheerful company was a pleasant relaxation after a hard day’s work. My mother never introduced scientific or learned subjects into general conversation. When they were brought forward by others, she talked simply and naturally about them, without the slightest pretension to superiority. Finally, to complete the list of her accomplishments, I must add that she was a remarkably neat and skillful needlewoman. We still possess some elaborate specimens of her embroidery and lace-work.”

This remarkable picture, the book shows to be faithful as a photograph. In a brief notice like the present, one can hardly glance at what Mary Somerville accomplished in science. The imposing list of her works on a fly-leaf of the memoir must remain a catalogue, merely, to almost all who read; owing to the abstruse nature of the subjects which engaged her thought and industry. But the sweetness of her domestic character appeals to all, and her perfectly rounded life suggests, in its inevitable association with the noisy disputes of the day, some serious reflections.

The first concerns her extreme rarity as a phenomenon. A woman like Mrs. Somerville is born, not made, and one is strongly impressed by the belief that no possible system of education, “ higher ” or other, could ever produce her like. And then one is led to reflect on the conditions most favorable to the development of genius in a woman when it does occur, since women must necessarily be so much more dependent upon circumstances than men. We have always had a fancy, — and the present volume confirms it, — that a woman’s chance for actual achievement is best where gentle breeding is combined with great simplicity of life and manners. There have occasionally been eminent female artists, theatrical and musical, who have risen from abject poverty and the very lowest layer of society ; but there is hardly an instance of a woman doing anything in letters, who had not respectable parentage and a comfortable early life. Where however society is formal, complex, and luxurious, there is employment for all a woman’s possible powers in beautifying and brightening society. The famous queens of the salon have almost always been women of a certain diffused and equalized genius, who lavished on the daily duties and amenities and outside details of life an amount of talent which is the wonder of all, men especially, who are used to economize their gifts, and which, if concentrated and strictly utilized, would probably have insured them a different sort of immortality. Nor can we bring ourselves to think such essentially humane use, even of the finest abilities, unworthy. And where, owing to the prevalence of whatever fanaticism, it has come to be so considered, we think that both the individual women and the society suffer. The reader can illustrate for himself.

But on the other hand, the book seems to teach us that where a woman feels within her a strong special aptitude irresistibly impelling her to an unusual career, she has only to strive patiently until she has achieved something positively valuable, and she may be sure of prompt and generous recognition by men. It is the unauthenticated claims, the restless demand for wider opportunities when the narrower have not been employed, that provoke to resistance and refusal. Mary Fairfax’s early enthusiasm for mathematics was systematically discouraged in her family, and by her first husband; yet when, after years of quiet perseverance, she supplied a “real want,” and produced an abstract of the Mécanique Céleste of La Place, suitable to be used as a text-book in the University of Cambridge, she was overwhelmed with testimonials of admiring appreciation. And these not merely from French savans, with whom flattery is a favorite art, and who ever glow and expatiate in the opportunity of saying fine things to a woman, but from Englishmen of the type of Lord Brougham and Dr. Whewell, who will certainly not be suspected of any sentimental bias or chivalrous weakness. And when Mrs. Somerville had followed up her first achievement of interpretation, by original works which really advanced the cause of physical science, nations vied with one another in offering her facilities for further study. The most precious and carefully guarded libraries were thrown open to her, and scores of learned societies, which had never admitted a woman before, elected her by acclamation to their membership. In short, all that for which too many women nowadays are content to sit and whine, or fitfully and carelessly struggle, came naturally and quietly to Mrs. Somerville. And the reason was that she never asked for anything until she had earned it. Or, rather, she never asked at all, but was content to earn.

And on the whole, we find, and are glad to find, strengthened by this charming memoir our beliefs in the wholesome and preservative power of severe study, no less for a woman than a man. It may be that few women are called to it, and that some who have the vocation will never find the opportunity, but it is certainly a capacity to be cultivated, if only as a provision against certain frequent contingencies of life. Mary Somerville’s health was delicate; she was never rich ; she was a woman of many sorrows. But it is impossible not to see in her grave and lofty intellectual pursuits the perpetual ballast of her life. She was a woman happy in her domestic relations, faithful, tender, and in every way admirable as a daughter, wife, and mother. But she outlived her husband, her idolized son, and most of her nearest friends, and was thrown in her last, lingering years very much on her own resources. At the age of ninety, when too feeble to rise before one o’clock, she used to amuse her morning hours in bed by the revision and completion of a treatise which she had written many years before on the Theory of Differences, and the study of a book on Quaternions; while in the afternoons she would examine and analyze the lovely flowers and ferns gathered by her daughters in the neighborhood of Sorrento, where she died. It is an affecting picture, and ought to be consoling, especially to women who are haunted, among other secret terrors, by the dread of a vacant and solitary old age.

— Popular interest in natural history has become so extended, that Dr. Packard’s little book on insects will be warmly welcomed. We wish it could have been presented in a more attractive dress ; the type is far too small, and some of the illustrations are too heavy and rude. But these defects are well-nigh forgotten in the interest of the text. The reader is carried, unawares, through accounts of structure, habit, and development, from the higher forms to the lowest groups of insects, and finally brought face to face with the inquiry, Whence all these myriad hosts ?

Indeed, our author seems himself to have been irresistibly drawn toward a consideration of the origin of insect structure and metamorphosis ; for it is curious to see how, in the previous special chapters, he has unconsciously—or with real purpose ' — dwelt with unusual emphasis upon the “ degraded ” types of each group. A most interesting account is given of the homes of the wild bees, which is no sooner concluded than we are introduced to all the horrors of their parasitic guests; the chapters on the mosquito, the house-fly, and their allies, draw half their interest from the description of the lowly organized flea and curious mallophaga; when the hemipterous insects are reached, the author dwells upon nothing but those creatures, the mere mention of whose name is “ tabooed and avoided by the refined and polite ; ” but he shows that “ a serious, thoughtful, and thorough study of the louse .... is neither belittling nor degrading,” The account of the neuroptera is confined to the spring-tails, their lowest members; and even when writing of octopod insects, he considers only the mites and ticks.

In harmony with this, he everywhere insists upon the importance of the study of embryology, and traces the early history of many insects of which he treats ; so convinced is he of the value of this knowledge in guiding us to an understanding of gradation of rank among animals, that he would carry investigation to the extremest details. His quick mind suggests at every step inquiries of the deepest interest, and his acknowledged erudition gives weight to the hints offered toward their solution. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the chapter on the ancestry of insects, the longest in the book, and one which will attract the attention of all naturalists. In common with Müller, Brauer, Lubbock, and indeed all writers who have discussed the origin of insects, our author acknowledges that the complication and diversity of their metamorphoses present the most perplexing difficulty. Muller was the first to attempt an explanation, by suggesting that the peculiar transformations of butterflies, moths, and other highly organized insects were afterthoughts of creation, so to speak; that is, that perfect insects existed before caterpillars, chrysalids, and all the strange alternations of form now seen. It is a fact that the earliest known insects were winged, but the testimony of the rocks upon this point is so excessively fragmentary as to carry bat little weight, and we are forced to draw our conclusions mainly from the developmental history of living forms. Still, authors now seem to agree that the “ complete ” metamorphosis of the higher groups is an acquired feature, and that previous to this acquirement the primitive insects resembled either cockroaches or spring-tails, both of which leave the egg in a form hardly differing from the adult.

In the attempt to trace their earlier history, these authors speculate with less confidence and less agreement; Müller, Haeckel, and Brauer deriving these primitive insects from a Zoëa-form crustacean, Packard and Lubbock tracing them through low arachnids, like the tardigruda, to the worms — a line of descent first doubtfully suggested by Haeckel. Packard marshals a long array of facts from every branch of study in support of his views, and discusses the whole topic with earnestness, clearness, and candor, together with a becoming spirit of reverence. Speaking of the law that governs the origin of species, he writes, —

“ Certainly the present attempts to discover that law, however fatuitous they may seem to many, are neither illogical, nor, judging by the impetus already given to biology, or the science of life, labor altogether spent in vain. The theory of evolution is a powerful tool, when judiciously used, that must eventually wrest many a secret from the grasp of nature.”

And further on : —

“Some writers of the evolution school are strenuous in the belief that the evolution hypothesis overthrows the idea of archetypes and plans of structure. But a true genealogy of animals and plants represents a natural system, and the types of animals, be they four, as Cuvier taught, or five, or more, are recognized by naturalists through the study of dry, hard anatomical facts.” “ Many short-sighted persons complain that such a theory sets in the background the idea of a personal Creator; but minds no less devout, and perhaps a trifle more thoughtful, see the hand of a Creator not less in the evolution of plants and animals from preëxistent forms, through natural laws, than in the evolution of a summer’s shower, through the laws discovered by the meteorologist, who looks back through myriads of ages to the causes that led to the distribution of mountain chains, ocean currents, and trade winds, which combine to produce the necessary conditions resulting in that shower.”

— Prosper llandoce is in almost every way the best of the novels of Cherbuliez. In it he shows far less tendency to melodramatic effects, and the ingenious representation of impossibilities, than is sometimes the case with this brilliant writer. It is a study of character, indeed of a number of very diverse characters, under circumstances which bear a likeness to the ordinary occurrences of daily life. The hero, who, by the way, does not give his name to the book, is one of those characters which are very commonly found in modern novels of a certain semiphilosophical kind, namely, one of the doubting, unardent men, who, besides running the ordinary risk of slip between cup and lip, add to the uncertainty of getting food to their mouth by stopping to analyze it and to find out if they are really hungry. Such heroes are the successors of the Byronic heroes of fifty years ago, with this difference, that they no longer meditate on mountain-tops or stain themselves with horrible crimes. They are very much tamed since those days, and they pride themselves more on their resemblance to Hamlet than on that to Childe Harold. Their task is to bring themselves into line with the rest of the world, not to set the times right; but over that they groan doubly, being at the same time physician and patient.

In comparison with this day-dreamer is put Prosper himself, who is made the vehicle of a great deal of well-deserved satire of the frivolities of French journalists. The unreasonableness of Prosper is made the means of putting energy into Didier’s listless soul; he is, as it were, shaken into action by his half-brother’s conduct. Running through the book there is the story of Didier’s love for a young widow, and the account of his uncertainty, hesitations, doubts, and fears, is well told. The whole novel is very clever and exceedingly interesting; while it has some passages that will be found distasteful by many, there is yet nothing morbid in the book, none of the deliberate and ostentatious predominance given to unpleasantness which so often mars French novels. Young people will hardly be much interested in the problem it discusses, and their elders will be able to overlook its faults in consideration of the numerous merits of the book. Cherbuliez never says the last word on any subject, but he manages to say the very clever word of an intelligent man, and that is very likely to be an entertaining one.

— Some twenty years ago a striking little tract was published in Boston, reprinted from an English edition, called The Stars and the Earth. It created a sensation, not among astronomers, but among many readers of a thoughtful turn outside the purely scientific world. It consisted of some grand and rather startling speculations concerning time and space, based on the laws of the transmission of light from the stars to the earth. It is well known that light travels at the rate of about 213,000 miles in a second. Our moon is 240,000 miles off, and her light consequently reaches us in a second and a quarter. Our sun is 95,000,000 miles distant, and eight minutes must elapse before we receive his first beams. The planet Jupiter, 617,000,000 miles away, requires fifty-two minutes, Uranus two hours, the planet Neptune (since discovered) three hours. The nearest fixed star, in the constellation of Centaur, is about eighteen billions of miles distant, and its rays require three years to reach us. Vega requires twelve years. Other stars are so remote as to require immensely longer periods of time to send us their light, reaching to thousands and millions of years. This being so, the stars that we see are only the stars as they were, three, twelve, a hundred, a thousand, or a million years ago; and a star may be actually extinguished, and yet its light shine on for centuries.

Reversing these propositions, an observer placed in any planet or star would receive the rays of light from the earth in the same respective time. Supposing it were possible for pictures or photographs of events on the earth to become visible, like the rays of light, to other worlds, those events that passed here would be actually seen only when our light reached them ; so that the observers in those orbs would be seeing only our past history, and not our present; would know the earth as it was one thousand, ten thousand, or one million years ago. But suppose that any one in those distant orbs had the power (astronomical or spiritual) to outrun the speed of light: it is evident that he could crowd the whole of our earth’s history into a few hours; for he would not have to wait for the arrival of these light couriers to bring him their photographs of what had passed; he would antedate them, fly to meet them on their way, and thus read the whole record of, say, four thousand or ten thousand years in a few rapid glances at the messengers as they met him.

Whether the author of this tract was M. Flammarion, who now writes Stories of Infinity, we know not, though it is plain that M. Flammarion treads in the same path, and takes up precisely the same ideas. But the French astronomer goes much further, and makes these facts the framework of a very pretty romance of the heavens, enriched all along with weighty reflections and enlivened by the most imaginative incidents. His narrative is conducted in the form of a dialogue between an Inquirer and Lumen, — the one was mortal, the other a disembodied spirit,—and he works it into a quite exciting series of ideal pictures of spirit life in the immensities of space and time, which cannot fail to impress the reader very vividly, especially as they all appear to be sustained by this inflexible anatomy of established astronomical law. Adopting the spirit of a departed astronomer as his chief speaker, he can carry him through the immensities as fast and as far as he chooses, unfettered by earthly limitations, with the Frenchman’s love of exactness and explicitness, which leads him to err in repetition rather than suffer any obscurity ; he dwells on wellknown facts, but dashes into statements, many of which we outside laymen must take for granted, since we have not his astronomical facilities in handling logarithms and fractions and overwhelming calculus. He also indulges in daring speculations concerning life and preëxistence and immortality. He describes his death, the emancipation of his soul from the body; he is carried with inconceivable swiftness to the star Capella, a distance of one hundred and seventy trillions three hundred and ninety-two milliards of leagues, where he finds a group of men absorbed in contemplating events passing upon our earth, — even in the city of Paris. After a while, he discovers that it is the Revolution of ’89 they are studying. That event, and the beheading of Louis XVI. seventy-two years before, has just reached their eyes. Lumen died aged seventy-two, so that the Revolution took place somewhere about the time he was born. After that he sees other events passing, that interest him personally. He even sees himself as a child, and as he grows up, and loves, and marries, etc. But as he sees these things in a very short space of time, it is proved that he is being drawn again to earth by a strong impulse, and he arrives in time to witness his own funeral! All this is satisfactorily accounted for by the laws of distances and the transmission of light. Again he is drawn back to the star Capella; and now, moving much faster than the light, he is enabled to note the earth’s history reversed: one by one the records of the past are seen, the last events happening first; till, always outspeeding the light, in the immensities he traverses, he notes the long scroll of history rolled backward, till there are no inhabitants upon the globe, till the Saurian ages, till the ages of fire and nebulous mist. Lumen reaches this fire-mist of creation, and thinks it is the end, till a voice speaks to him and corrects the impression ; for he has been fleeing from the solar system at a speed swifter than light.

But this is not all. Wonders upon wonders crowd upon the reader. Lumen relates how from his home in Capella he discovers in the star Virgo himself in a preexistent state; how he was born into that world in the year 45904, which corresponds to the terrestrial Christian year 1677, and that he died in the year 45913, corresponding to our year 1767. He is enabled to review this anterior life side by side with his later earthly life, the rays of light from the distant Virgo and from the Earth reaching him at the same moment. He thus accounts for those “ shadowy recollections,” which always seemed to him like veiled gleams from a preëxistent state ; and he goes into a series of reflections upon the soul showing that it must have always existed.

He states that he has lived several lives before the earthly life. At one time he was a looman; further back a sort of reasoning tree. This was about fifteen centuries ago. Twenty-four hundred years ago he inhabited the star Theta of Orion, as a sort of vegetable wax-taper, or Man-Mullen, and he hopes to spend his next life in the system of Sirius. Through all these stages of the narrative are interwoven scientific and philosophic speculations which will be, we think, to many readers, if not instructive, at least suggestive, and enlarging to the imaginative intellect.

The second half of M. Flammarion’s book is occupied mainly with the history of a comet, which is no less fanciful, and no less founded on the real, than his speculations on light, time, and space.

OTHER PUBLICATIONS.

Messrs. J. R. Osgood & Co., Boston, have sent us Mrs. Grace A. Ellis’s Life and Works of Mrs. Anna Lætitia Barbauld, in two volumes, the first containing a memoir and many of her letters, and the second a selection from her writings in verse and prose. Of this work, as well as Lord Lytton’s (Owen Meredith’s) Fables in Song, published by the same house, we hope to speak critically hereafter.

We also reserve for criticism The Parisians, by Lord Lytton (Bulwer), and Diamond cut Diamond, a Story of Italian Life, by T. Adolphus Trollope, published by Harper and Brothers, New York, from whom we have received, besides these books, a volume by J. Grey Jewell, lately United States Consul at Singapore, entitled Among our Sailors, — an inquiry into the present condition of the American mercantile marine, and an exposure of the intolerable cruelties and oppressions of the seamen sailing under our flag.

Miss Ellen Frothingham, who gave us some years ago so agreeable a version of Goethe’s Hermann and Dorothea, has translated Lessing’s essay on Laocoön, which, with the revised edition of The Record of Mr. Alcott’s School, we have received from Roberts Brothers, Boston. This, the third edition of the Record, has a new preface by “ the Recorder,” in which Miss Peabody, while still agreeing with Mr. Alcott that “ education must be moral, intellectual, and spiritual, as well as physical, from the very beginning of life,” holds that “ Frocbel’s method of cultivating children through artistic production, in the childish sphere of affection and fancy, is a healthier and more effective way than self-inspection, for at least those years of a child’s life before the age of seven.”

Henry Holt & Co., New York, have added to their singularly well-selected Leisure Hour Series, Jupiter’s Daughters, a novel by Mrs. C. Jenkin, who wrote, among other stories, Who Breaks, Pays — a story so good that all who have read it will desire to see her new fiction.

Animal Locomotion, or Walking, Swimming, and Flying, with a Dissertation on Aeronautics, by J. Bell Pettigrew; and The Conservation of Energy, by Balfour Stewart, are the latest volumes in the International Scientific Series of D. Appleton & Co., New York.

G. P. Putnam’s Sons publish, in their Advanced Science Series, Animal Philosophy : the Structure and Functions of the Human Body, by John Cleland.

Estes and Lauriat, Boston, are publishing in semi-monthly parts, or as rapidly as the issue of the work in Paris will allow, Guizot’s Popular History of France, with two hundred and forty illustrations on wood by De Neuville, and forty steel plates. The sumptuous letterpress of the American edition is by the University Press of Cambridge, by which the wood-cuts have also been very admirably printed. The work is to be completed in some forty-five parts, and is to be sold only by subscription. We have seen no other subscription book which for literary, artistic, and mechanical excellence could be so unreservedly commended. The same publishers send us Famous Cases of Circumstantial Evidence, with an Introduction on the Theory of Presumptive Proof, by S. N. Phillips; also, Lord Campbell’s Lives of the Chief Justices of England, in four volumes.

We have received the following publications: The Teachings of the Ages : in two Parts, by A. C. Traveler, from A. L. Bancroft & Co., San Francisco — apparently a view of the church in the present and the past from a sort of Swcdenborgian standpoint. The Structure of Animal Life : Six Lectures delivered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1862, by Louis Agassiz; and On Self-Culture, Intellectual, Physical, and Moral, by John Stuart Blackie, Professor of Greek in the University of Edinburgh ; from Scribner, Armstrong & Co., New York. The Life of Edwin Forrest, with Reminiscences and Personal Recollections, by James Rees ; from T, B. Peterson and Brothers, Philadelphia. Bella, or the Cradle of Lib erty : a Story of Insane Asylums, by Mrs. Eugenia St. John ; from N. D. Berry, Boston. Sermons by the Rev. Henry Norman Hudson; from Ginn Brothers, Boston. Lyrics of a Country Lane, a Miscellany of Verse, by John L. Owen; from Simpkin, Marshall & Co., London.

FRENCH AND GERMAN.³

The two volumes of M. Mérimée’s correspondence are as interesting a contribution to modern literature as has appeared for many a day. The interest they possess is of various kinds : it is personal, social, and literary. The letters, which run over nearly thirty years, from 1842 until Mérimée’s death in 1870, were written by him to a woman whose name is unknown ; but who, according to the most trustworthy accounts, was a young girl of French birth but of English breeding, who had become the companion of an English lady, and who thereby was less mistress of her time and of herself than she otherwise would have been. The knowledge of this fact will save the reader from much misapprehension of the mysteriousness of the relations in which she and Mérimée stood to one another, and of which the letters contain very many traces. But, starting with this information, the reader will find plenty to puzzle his ingenuity in determining the presence and the amount of that emotion which generally finds some place in the letters of a man to a woman. It must be remembered that we have here only half of a correspondence, but from this it will not be difficult to build up more or less plausible theories as to the light in which they regarded one another. It would be hardly fair to call these love-letters, but they are all the more entertaining reading for us outsiders that they are not. At one time Mérimée seems to have a very tender feeling for his correspondent, but it is a calm and chastened passion that inspires him, as much due to pique at the coolness with which she concealed herself from his observation as to anything else. His letters are too well written for love-letters ; if he had been fairly in earnest he would have forgotten to be witty. It does not seem to be so much that he wrote his letters for publication and with an eye on posterity, as that he wrote all the time with his own very critical eye turned upon himself; he was his own public, very willing and able to turn himself to ridicule at the slightest transgression of a certain formal code he had adopted as his rule of life. Nothing but a tremendous passion could have delivered him from these self-imposed shackles, and the moment it had done so his letters would have been vastly less witty, vastly less amusing for us, but a great deal more genuine. This artificiality which Mérimée put upon himself reminds one of clothes ; as society is constituted clothes are indispensable, but when a man is so careful of his dress that he cannot stretch out his arm or lie down on the grass or run across a field without nervousness, one is inclined to approve of the savage and pity the man who is so exceedingly civilized. It is, however, the civilized man who will write the most entertaining letters. After a time, what little warmth there is in the letters gives way to a more genuine friendship, and that continues to the end.

This same quality, coldness, which is so especially noticeable in the letters, is plain enough, too, in all his writings. His shorter stories are, for the most part, very clever, indeed as regards workmanship they could hardly be improved; but while this makes him less dangerous when, as is often the case, he is very national in the choice of his subject, it certainly goes just as far in diminishing his influence in those cases where another writer would legitimately move us by arousing our sympathy. It gives him an appearance of greater weakness than his many excellences would seem to justify ; it shows us for the thousandth time that smooth writing, wit, all kinds of cleverness, are useful in their proper place, but that they should be subordinated to the main quality which a writer must have if he wishes the same feeling for him in his readers, and that is, sympathy. Most friendship may be feigning and most love mere folly, as the disappointed preach ; but meanwhile there is a large and respectable number of people, who may be over-credulous, but who hold to the contrary, and who go to make up the public. As Taine says in the introduction, “ Mérimée, in trying to be the dupe of nothing, became the dupe of himself.”

If we take the letters, however, for what they are, without trying to read between the lines, we shall find plenty of entertainment. In the two volumes there is not a dull page; we have set before us an admirable picture of the life and working of the second empire, drawn by a man who was of no value as a politician, but who was enabled by his position to see a great deal more than falls to the lot of the humbler citizen. The following anecdote may serve as an example of some of the amusing scenes he describes. He is speaking of Rachel, the actress.

“ I dined with her ten days ago at the house of an Academician. The dinner was given that she might meet Béranger. There was a number of great men there. She came late and her entrance displeased me. The men said, and the women did, so many foolish things when they saw her, that I did not stir from my corner. Besides, it was a year since I had seen her. After dinner, Béranger, with his usual good-nature and good sense, said she made a mistake in limiting herself to performances in drawingrooms, and that a fitting public could be found only at the Théâtre François, etc. Mademoiselle Rachel seemed to approve of the sentiment, and to show how much she had profited by it, she performed the first act of Esther. Some one was needed to read the other parts, and an Academician who seemed to be her cicisbeo brought me a Racine. I said roughly I knew nothing about poetry, and that in the room there were many people in that line, who could scan the verses much better than I could. Hugo excused himself on acount of weak eyes, another for something else. The master of the house undertook it. Imagine Rachel, dressed in black, between a piano and the tea-table, with a door behind her, assuming a theatrical expression. This operation was very amusing and very fine ; it took about two minutes, then she began: ‘ Est-ce toi, chére Élse ? . . .

“ The confidant in the middle of his reply dropped the book and lost his spectacles ; it was ten minutes before he could find his place again. The audience saw that Esther was rather losing her temper. She goes on. The door behind opens ; it is a servant coming in. They make signs to him to go away. He withdraws, but can’t shut the door behind him; it swings back and accompanies Rachel with a very amusing creak. Since it did not stop, Rachel put her hand to her heart and complained of faintness ; but like a person accustomed to die on the stage, she waited for some one to catch her. In the interlude, Hugo and M. Thiers began to discuss Racine. Hugo said Racine was an inferior poet and Corneille a great one. ‘ You say so,’answered Thiers, ‘ because you are yourself a great poet; you are the Corneille' (here Hugo began to smirk modestly) ' of a period of which the Racine is Casimir.Delavigne.’ I leave you to imagine the importance of such modesty. Nevertheless the faintness and the act came to an end, but it was not a success. Some one who knows Mademoiselle Rachel very well said as we were leaving, ‘ How she must have sworn this evening, as she was going home ! ’ ”

In the course of his life he traveled a great deal; he was in Germany, Spain, and England ; he had friends everywhere. The English society he finds far from interesting; he complains of the meagreness and unsatisfactoriness of its amusements. For instance, he writes as follows from London, in the year 1865 : —

“ I have just passed three days with his [Lord Palmerston’s] probable successor, Mr. Gladstone; this has not amused me, but it has interested me, for I always like to observe the varieties of human nature. Here they are so unlike what we have with us, that it is hard to explain why the featherless bipeds, living only ten hours off, should bear so little resemblance to those of Paris. In some respects Mr. Gladstone seemed to me a man of genius, in others, a fool. He has the qualities of a child, a statesman, and a fool.”

Of Bismarck he says, “Another person, M. de Bismarck, pleased me more [than the King of Portugal]. He is a tall German, very polite, but not at all simple. He lacks gemüth, but he is very witty. He made a complete conquest of me.”

About the late emperor of the French and the Imperial court he writes more or less. The fatiguing life of a courtier comes in for an occasional hit; he exposes much of the corruption the empire brought into his country: indeed, it is as pictures of an interesting period that these volumes have probably their greatest importance. They will serve to throw light upon our times as the famous memoirs of preceding generations do upon their own days. For that purpose they seem admirably, almost intentionally fitted, but the appearance of preparation may be due simply to the fact that they were written by a man who had very little interest in the life he was leading, and who therefore put himself more in the position of one who exposed what he saw, than of one who fairly believed in it all. Without intention Mérimée composed a sort of compendium of the modern history of France. This fact alone would make the volumes interesting, even if there were not besides a mystery about the love affair in the first volume, which can be a nine-days’ talk with those people who feel themselves baffled by having only half of the correspondence— and with omissions at that — between a man who dreaded marriage and a woman who evidently was far from averse to coquetry. In other words, there is no one who will find the book uninteresting. It is better, by far, than most novels.